Memories of a Heavyweight

By Tom Callahan

Jack Dempsey: 1895-1983

He won the heavyweight championship of the world 64 years ago from Jess Willard and lost it seven years later to Gene Tunney, but right up until the day he died last week, many still thought of Jack Dempsey as champion. And one could not think of Dempsey without thinking of Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, Bill Tilden, Red Grange. Other athletes have survived to 87, but no other period in sport, and maybe not just in sport, has lingered so glamorously long. The '20s not only roared, they remained.

In one of life's delightful juxtapositions, reasonable people are capable of making memories of events that occurred years before they were born, never letting a technicality that slight exclude them from an argument as rich as the "long count" fight of 1927. Failing to withdraw to a neutral corner, as a new rule required after knockdowns, Dempsey inadvertently allowed Tunney perhaps 14 seconds to defog his head in the seventh round and go on to outpoint Jack for a second time. "The best thing that ever happened to both of us was the long count," Dempsey said a few years ago. "Half the people thought he won, the other half thought I won. They're still arguing about it."

Dempsey never contested either loss to Tunney, a wonderful boxer but a colorless fighter whose unforgivable sins were that he read books and beat Dempsey. "Honey, I forgot to duck," Dempsey told his wife after the first fight, a line President Reagan found use for 55 years later. When Tunney died in 1978 at the age of 80, Dempsey said, "Now I feel alone."

He was Kid Blackie before he was Jack Dempsey, and he was William Harrison Dempsey before that. Also the Manassa Mauler, for the Colorado cow town where he was born on June 24, 1895. Toughening his face by marinating it in brine, hardening his jaw by chomping pine gum, Dempsey set out hoboing across the West and brawling in saloons. "You and your opponent would go at it," he exlpained, "and if the bar patrons liked it, they'd pass the hat."

Names conjured more romance then. Jess Willard was the Pottawatomie Giant. Georges Carpentier was the Orchid Man. Luis Angel Firpo, the Argentine, was the Wild Bull of the Pampas. Those were Dempsey's great foes. Knocked clear through the ropes by Firpo in the second round, Dempsey came back to floor the Wild Bull an eighth, ninth and tenth time.

In Dempsey's lore of names there is also a town: Shelby, Mont. (1923 pop. 2,000). The way Johnstown had a flood, Shelby had a prizefight. Hankering to be a world capital for a day, Shelby constructed a 40,000-seat arena for a Dempsey-Tommy Gibbons fight, only to have trouble raising the $300,000 guarantee required by Dempsey's rascally manager Jack ("Doc") Kearns. ("Give Doc 1,000 Ibs. of steel wool," it was said, "and he'll knit you a stove.") Barely 7,000 people paid to see the fight: the rest crashed the fences. Two banks failed. The town virtually bankrupted itself. And Dempsey beat Gibbons, who was not paid.

Another Dempsey contribution to language was "million-dollar gate," his 1921 knockout of Carpentier at Boyle's Thirty Acres in Jersey City being the first. In an unusual result for fighters of any day, he kept some of the money. Before settling into the window table at Jack Dempsey's Broadway restaurant in Manhattan, he tried a little barnstorming, some refereeing. Always he was available to bat out an occasional dilettante, like Writer Paul Gallico or Financier J. Paul Getty. After he closed the restaurant in 1974, Dempsey returned full time to being heavyweight champ.

--By Tom Callahan

MARRIAGE REVEALED. Dan Aykroyd, 30, wild and crazy Canadian comic actor and writer (The Blues Brothers, Trading Places); and Donna Dixon, 25, actress (TV's Bosom Buddies series), who met him last year while the two were making Doctor Detroit; both for the first time; in Chilmark, Martha's Vineyard, Mass.; on April 29. They decided to keep the wedding quiet so it would not be used as publicity for their movie.

DIVORCED. Robert MacNeil, 52, TV journalist and co-host of PBS's nightly MacNeil/Lehrer Report; and Jane Doherty MacNeil, 42, antiques dealer and photographers' and jewelers' agent; after 18 years of marriage (his second, her first), two children; in White Plains, N.Y.

DIED. Donald Gramm, 56, aristocratic American bass-baritone, one of opera's most respected and versatile singer-actors as well as a celebrated interpreter of art songs, who used his sonorous and flexible voice, impeccable musicianship and instinctive dramatic ability to create dozens of finely calculated characterizations; of a heart attack; in New York City.

DIED. Alfred M. Gnienther, 84, four-star U.S. Army general who was right-hand man to Generals Dwight Eisenhower and Mark Clark in World War II and European commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from 1953 to 1956; of pneumonia; in Washington, D.C. Gruenther was able to crunch huge amounts of data down to the essentials, earning the nickname "the brain." Recommended for the NATO post by Ike, Gruenther kept Allied forces in such a high state of readiness that some NATO members concluded, to his distress, that they could cut their troops and attend to other commitments.

DIED. Arvid Pelshe, 84, Latvian Communist who was the oldest member of the Soviet Union's ruling Politburo and, as the token representative of the Baltic states, perhaps its least influential; after a long illness. Last of the old Bolsheviks who played a leading role in the October Revolution of 1917, Pelshe worked as a secret policeman and political commissar; when the Soviet army occupied his country in 1940, he became one of its new rulers. Elevated to the Politburo in 1966, Pelshe headed the Party Control Committee, which oversees the discipline of party members. His death reduces membership in the Politburo, which has numbered as many as 16, to a scant eleven, prompting speculation that Party Chief Yuri Andropov may soon make appointments.

DIED. Milton R. Young, 85, quiet-spoken Republican Senator from North Dakota (1945-81), who was dubbed "Mr. Wheat" for his farm-bloc leadership and his advocacy of constituents' agricultural interests and who served the greatest number of consecutive years for a Republican Senator; of cancer; in Sun City, Ariz. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.